I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [121]
One of our dancers got through to the U.S. on a phone call: “Oh my God, do you realize there’s a big crisis going on, and we may be going to war with Russia!”
The Cuban missile crisis had been brewing, but none of the dancers knew it. The U.S. Embassy played dumb. Then, one morning at breakfast, we were officially told to avoid the embassy that day between the hours of two and five p.m. “The Russians are staging a demonstration. Not a good idea to be around.” For an hour or so, shouting protestors threw bottles of ink at the walls of the embassy while cameras rolled. When the photo op was over, that was it. They dispersed. Years later, Betty Cage confessed, “I didn’t sleep much. We had escape plan A, B, and C.” Plan A: look into chartering a plane so, if word came from the U.S. Embassy saying, “It’s about to happen, get out, get out!” we could hopefully bus to the waiting plane and flee. Plan B: if we were too late for a plane, surreptitiously keep the bus on call twenty-four hours, so that if we got the word “War has been declared,” the whole company could pack into the bus, and maybe have a chance to get inside the American Embassy. Plan C: no luck, interred in a gulag, doing barre in barracks. In her laconic, deadpan monotone, Betty elaborated on Plan C: “Well, the Bolshoi Ballet company is touring America. They care about their dancers. Maybe our state department will too, then we’ll get traded. Or maybe not.”
The Russian Literary Guild planned, for their union’s annual celebration, a show—a potpourri of Slavic arts, featuring folk dancers, a violinist, ballet, a vaudeville act, and an opera singer. And the guild was pressuring Balanchine to have his dancers perform. Balanchine dissembled; the minister of culture insisted.
There was no way he could squeeze out of it, so I suggested, “Why don’t Allegra and I do the pas de deux from A Midsummer Night’s Dream? It’s not taxing, and can be done in a small space.” That night, we went to the Literary Guild and, in the wee hours, on a stage the size of an index card—maybe fifteen feet by ten—performed before a hall packed with vodka-swilling trolls. Hating every second, Balanchine introduced us and disappeared, hiding backstage. Allegra and I adjusted the choreography to fit the index card; a series of lifts ordinarily done on a long diagonal became oscillating cabrioles, one to the right, pivot, one to the left, pivot, to the right, to the left. The audience talked and drank the whole time, and I don’t remember any applause when we finished. We were followed by an accordion player who received an ovation.
Balanchine was a wreck, miserable with bursitis of the rotator cuff, and it seemed everywhere he went, people hugged him or patted him on the shoulder. Lincoln and Betty Cage made arrangements for him to return to New York after Leningrad. “He’s got to get away,” Betty explained, “if only for a week. He’s cracking up.” Betty told me Tanny called and told Lincoln that she didn’t want Balanchine to come back, but Lincoln insisted, “He needs to get out for a while.” I had the feeling it was his obsession with Diana Adams that was cracking their marriage.
We’d had enough of Moscow. We were ready for Leningrad. But our closing night at the Bolshoi left no doubt we were a triumph. I felt terrific dancing Scotch Symphony with Milly. Episodes and Symphony in C closed the program. The applause went on so long, Balanchine made a speech to the audience, “We have to leave now …,” and, deliberately using the tzarist name for Leningrad, “ … you know, leave for PETROGRAD!”
A bevy of Balanchine’s old classmates met him at the station in Leningrad. With a drawn face, he later told me, “I had to be nice.”
Our hotel in Leningrad, the Astoria, built in 1912, was once an Art Nouveau honey. Now seedy, a frayed lady with runny makeup, it was an apt setting for the paper bag travelogue. We